‘Last Nomad’ Recalls Rituals, Hardships and Beauty of a Childhood in the Somali Desert

“Right now,” writes Shugri Said Salh at the outset of her new memoir, “I should be married to an old nomadic man, leading a nasty-tempered camel through the desert in search of water.” That’s if war and family circumstances had not wrested Salh from her nomadic childhood in the Somali desert, sending her on a migratory journey that ended in Northern California. We’ll talk to Salh about her life’s arc as a goat herder, a refugee and a suburban mother of three — and how her early nomadic years inform her daily life now.